Bell Tower of the Epiphany Cathedral

On Bauman Street, in front of the modest Epiphany Cathedral standing deep within its courtyard, rises a free-standing bell tower — by common consent, a far more recognizable symbol of Kazan than the church itself. Various sources put its height at anywhere from 62 to 74 meters, and for a long time this tower remained the tallest structure in the city; its silhouette is still visible from almost any point in the historic center.

The first, modest tented belfry appeared beside the stone Epiphany Church back in the mid-eighteenth century, funded by the merchants Mikhlyaev and Chernov. The city owes its far grander new structure to the will of the first-guild merchant Ivan Krivonosov, who in 1892 left the church a substantial sum earmarked specifically for building a bell tower. A competition for a design in the old Russian style was announced the following summer, and the question of authorship of the winning entry remains disputed to this day — different sources name either the architect Heinrich Rusch, who received the competition prize, or Mikhail Mikhailov, who oversaw construction; the Kazan archives even preserve documents from their dispute over authorship.

The foundation was laid at the end of 1893, but work stalled for almost two years and only resumed in the spring of 1895; the scaffolding finally came down in the summer of 1897. The tower is arranged as a multi-tiered vertical: a massive two-story base with faceted tented turrets at its corners is pierced by an archway leading through to the church, above which rises an octagonal shaft with two tiers of bells and large arched openings. The brick decoration combines keel-shaped kokoshniks and arcature bands with the geometric motifs of the turn of the twentieth century — about two million bricks went into the masonry.

In the autumn of 1900 a new bell weighing more than eight tons, delivered by rail, was raised to the belfry, and a gilded wrought-iron cross was installed. A year later lightning struck the upper tier, damaging the roof and masonry. It was in the Epiphany Church that the future singer Feodor Chaliapin was baptized in February 1873, and he later sang there in the church choir — in his memory, a monument to the singer was erected beside the bell tower in 1998.

After the revolution the church was closed, the bell tower’s premises were given over to shops, and the cathedral building itself was handed to the university as a gymnasium. The bell tower was granted protected architectural monument status in 1960 and restored in 1973. When the cathedral was returned to believers in the mid-1990s, the bell tower remained under the republic’s Ministry of Culture: today it houses an exhibition hall of the Tatarstan Museum of Fine Arts and the Chaliapin chamber concert hall, opened in 2001.

An observation deck is now set up on the upper tiers of the bell tower, offering a panorama of Bauman Street, the Kazan Kremlin, and the Volga. The combination of museum, concert, and viewing functions makes the tower one of the most visited spots in the city’s pedestrian center, and its silhouette remains one of Kazan’s calling cards alongside the towers of the Kremlin.